[Notes for the run of February 24, 2000.]

Calais furts back into the passage and by whispers and signs tells Paris
what he saw in the room: a bunch of kobolds, and two trolls at the left
wall.  He also warns about the trap; as he disarms it, Paris passes the word
back through Anton to the rest of the party.

Calais peeks in again to see what the creatures are doing.  The trolls seem
to be carving out a table.  At that moment, though, one of the kobolds heads
in our direction, and he starts to yell something.  The language is neither
human nor Fell, but Calais assumes he's been spotted, so he moves into the
room to let the rest of the party enter.  Paris moves in in front of Calais,
but the others (and especially Rhori and Hobbes, at the rear) have to wait
for Anton to move.  Paris's sword (an ordinary bastard sword borrowed from
Lucas; she didn't think to switch to her spiffy sword as she moved up) is
glowing blue.

The trolls head across the room toward Paris and Calais.  One of the kobolds
gestures and chants, and Paris and Calais are enveloped in smoky darkness.
Paris senses a blow headed at her, but it skates off her shield.

Anton heads forward, his magical torch disappearing into the darkness.  The
rest of the party follows.  Movement in the narrow passage is at half-rate.

Paris drops her sword and draws her spiffy sword instead.  A hole in the
darkness appears around her, but the smoke continues to billow further away.
She moves forward, leaving Calais again in darkness.  As she comes out of
the smoke, the kobolds, who had been jumping up and down in glee, suddenly
stop in shock.  The trolls are unswayed.

She swings and hits a troll in whatever passes for a shoulder.  She cuts
deeply into it but does not cleave it in two.  (Good thing, else we might
have to fight both halves.)  It is stunned.

Alexis makes it into the room, clearing the entrance, but bumps into Calais
and stops.  Calais manages not to stumble, and heads forward after Paris.
He stops at the edge of the smoke cloud, behind Paris.  Alexis continues
along the back wall and comes out the far edge of the darkness.  She finds
herself face to, um, whatever, with a troll, which fact she announces with
the ever-popular soliloquy, "Oh shit."  The troll ignores Alexis and swings
at Paris, who blocks.

Lucas comes a little ways into the room, while Pyotr, next in line, pauses
at the exit of the crevasse.  Rhori, running up from behind (raising sparks
as his armor and shield scrape off the walls), pushes past him without
either falling over.  Hobbes follows.

Calais slides along the left wall to get past Paris and the trolls.  He
bumps into something soft that goes "Oof" and falls over.  "Sorry, Anton,"
mutters Calais.

Paris hits the troll in the "knee"; it's not stunned this time.  Rhori moves
up and tries to whack the other one, but the head comes off his battle-axe
(Mike rolled an 18).  The troll retreats a bit to get its back to a wall,
and whangs Rhori solidly, stunning him.  Hobbes roars in rage and claws the
troll, tearing its shoulder and chest.  The darkness fades as the roar
apparently startles the kobold responsible for it.  Alexis and Lucas also
swing at the same troll; Alexis hits for reasonable damage.  The other troll
swings at Paris but misses.

Calais runs toward the nearest kobold, but before he can reach it it
gestures and seems to be casting a spell at Calais's feet.  Calais tries
to dive out of the way, but isn't quick enough, and is caught by a flash.
Another kobold shoots an arrow at him, but the puny missile does no damage.

The other kobolds are trying to find ways out of the room.  It seems the
crevasse is the only way out, and one kobold tries to get to it via the
only path not apparently filled by one of us.  Anton, seeing it approach,
considers whacking it with his sword, but instead brings the torch image
over to make it to back.  Anton thus remains invisible.

Hobbes leaps onto the troll that hurt Rhori, latching firmly onto its head
(critical hit!) and also clawing at its guts.

Alexis heads forward.  A kobold flashes her also, but she continues forward
and swings in its general vicinity.  Calais rolls to his feet.  Though
blinded, he manages to hear the nearest kobolds over the sound of Paris's
sword, and swings at one.  It dodges, but he hits it anyway, though he fails
to stun it.  Another arrow bounces off Calais's kneecap.

The kobold faced with Anton's torch, recognising the torch as a magical
effect, dives for cover, landing prone in front of Pyotr.  Pyotr stuns it.
Both trolls are also stunned, so we manage to polish off them and the
kobolds without further incident.  Pyotr heals Rhori's wound.

Calais and Alexis find two cards on each troll.  Alexis's troll had a slip
of paper sandwiched between the cards.  Calais also finds the, um, secret
crotch pouch on his troll, but we have to wait for Pat to tell Don what was
in it before we know if Calais mentions it.

Alexis's paper has a neat lower edge and a torn upper edge.  On it, in a
single line, are two capitalised words, each followed by a period: Ending.
Final.  She asks Calais if his troll had any paper.  Nope.  Calais comes
over and checks her troll for a secret crotch pouch.  It has one.  Alexis
winces in disgust when she sees him reaching in.

Recalling a question she'd thought of earlier, Paris asks Pyotr if he knows
the ritual for laying dead people to rest, and whether he has whatever is
needed for it.  Pyotr is startled.  "Somebody die?"  Paris explains about
the dead miner in Etienne, and reminds us that the miner named Roget may
have died here as well, so it might become necessary to do that ritual.
Anyway, yes, Pyotr knows the ritual.

Lucas recognises the partially carved table as an altar.  It is not yet
evil, nor even consecrated as an altar.  That implies there's an evil priest
in the area who was going to perform the consecration.  (Alexis notes that
the demon might be able to do that.)

We're not sure how the trolls got into this room; they won't fit through the
passage.  (We continue to whack them occasionally as they regenerate.  Even
Paris's sword doesn't do permanent damage.)  We check for secret doors but
find none.  Calais wonders if maybe somebody hauled a couple of chunks of
troll down the passage and let them regrow inside the room.  Someone else
suggests that perhaps they were summoned in some way, perhaps by creating a
connection between Torat and wherever it is trolls come from.  [Didn't we
hear that there was some sort of portal like that at Baron duBois's place?]

As we keep whacking on the trolls, Rhori finds a piece of paper in one claw
of the troll Calais first checked.  It is torn on both the top and bottom.
It reads, "Fifth is not me or him."  Calais exclaims that he understands
this clue.  After being reassured that explaining it aloud won't let the
demon control him, he says, "Not me or him means `you'.  The fifth letter of
its name is U!"  We think perhaps the other paper means the last letter is
Z.  And if the clues are indeed trying to spell out the name for us, the
original Justice/Law clue presumably does mean "K", but we don't know where
in the name it belongs.

Calais is pretty sure that this latest paper wasn't there when he checked
that troll.  He checks again, finding no further paper.  Pyotr muses maybe
only people who fought the troll can find papers.  Paris and Lucas look, but
don't find anything.

Rhori eventually finishes breaking apart the incomplete altar, and we carve
up the trolls enough to carry them back outside.  We take them some distance
from the crevasse and build a bonfire to finish them off.  Calais has
everyone check one last time before we start the fire, but no more papers
turn up.

We go around to have a look at the mine.  As we get there, Anton's magic
pool recharges, so we know it's midnight.  We waffle about whether that's a
bad time to go into the mine.  Calais observes that all the clues we've
gotten so far -- except the one we heard about in Tauban about Justice and
Law -- we got at night.  We decide to go in and have a look.  This time
Paris wields her holy sword.  She asks if anyone wants to carry the sword
she'd been using earlier (Lucas's bastard sword?).  Pyotr remarks that he's
not quite strong enough yet to wield a bastard sword, though he could manage
a broadsword.  Someone (Alexis?) scrounges up a spare broadsword to loan
him.

We get to the end of the mine.  Calais's rigged blockage in the wall has
been moved; it's lying on the ground.  Calais examines it and concludes that
someone very carefully put it down, somehow doing it without disturbing the
arrangement.  [More on this later.]  Anton takes a look, perforce brief,
with magic sight, and reports that a spell went through a while ago; he's
not sure when.  Calais resets the arrangement and we head off.

As we leave the mine, it starts to rain heavily.  We're pretty sure the
trolls were done burning by now, though.  We go back to town.  Since we've
heard that nothing strange tends to happen when it's raining hard at night,
we go to our own lodgings, start a warm fire, and get some sleep.

Rhori asks Calais if he can fix the broken axe.  Calais can't, but suggests
that perhaps someone at the garrison will be able to fix it.  We can check
there tomorrow.  Paris adds that we can ask the garrison their view of
what's been happening, and in particular when the Justice/Law clue was
found.

Late in the morning, we go to the inn.  The other party isn't there.  We ask
the innkeeper, who tells us that they went off to investigate some smoke.
We ask the innkeeper more about what's been happening.  He retells the story
of the miner, Roget, who screamed the most terrifying scream anyone had ever
heard, and never came out.  His body has never been found.  Rhori tries to
reassure the innkeeper that we went to the mine last night and nothing
happened to us, and suggests that we could lead parties of miners in and
guard them so they can start earning a living again while we continue to
investigate the source of the problem, but the innkeeper points out that
nobody is willing to go back in until they know that what happened to Roget
won't happen to them.

We ask if there are any miners left who were with Roget.  The innkeeper
points out a fellow named Josephus, who's over in a corner drinking his
lunch.  Josephus tells us the tale.  Amid much stammering, it goes something
like this.  "We were picking up, and getting ready to head out, and I turned
to say something to Roget, and he screamed, and the sound bounced around
until it was like the whole cave was screaming, and something wrapped around
him and just dragged him away."  It takes a while to calm him down again,
but there's not much more to learn.  Calais asks Josephus who the foreman
is, and whether he's still here.  Yes, he's here; his name is Tomas.  We can
probably find him over at the garrison.  Well, we were planning to head
there anyway.

Having Sir Paris with us helps us gain entrance to the garrison.  We leave
Alexis behind since she's too likely to be recognised as the Duke's herald,
and then they'd feel obliged to guard her.

We ask Tomas about the Justice/Law note.  Tomas tells us the note was found
when people went in to look for Roget's body, the day after he disappeared.
(So much for Calais's "clues only at night" theory.)

We tell the foreman and garrison leader about kobolds and trolls; they
thought such creatures were just fantasy.  The folks out here haven't even
encountered orcs.  We tell them those things are real.  After a bit of
explanation, Paris says that we think there's something attracting the
kobolds and trolls, and we need to figure out what that is and deal with it.

We ask Tomas if the other party has talked to him about what they're doing.
He says yes, he's talked to Singer, but when he thinks about it Tomas
realises he can't remember getting any actual information from him.

Rhori repeats the idea he brought up with the innkeeper, of having a group
of miners go in under guard to prove it can be worked.  Tomas says he'd be
willing, and maybe a few others, but says several times that what it would
really take to make folks willing to go in again is to be sure that what
happened to Roget won't happen to them.  It seems clear (at least on a
meta-level) that figuring out what _did_ happen to Roget would be useful.

As we continue to talk with Tomas, Rhori and Paris begin to argue about the
right approach.  Rhori keeps repeating his idea sending in groups under
guard to show it can be done.  Paris isn't convinced that we know enough
about what's happening to be able to make such an assurance.  Calais agrees
with Paris, and suggests that we could at least offer reassurance that the
problem is being investigated and progress is being made.  Eventually Tomas
gets irritated and tells us to come back when we have something useful to
tell him.

We do manage to learn that the paper clue was, he thinks, torn on both the
top and bottom edges.

We talk to the soldiers, and Rhori finds someone who can fix his axe.  It'll
be ready by the end of the day.  Rhori offers to buy the fellow dinner and
some drinks.

We drop in on the padre and find that the candles burned about two-thirds of
the way down, i.e. they didn't burn during the first part of the night but
started burning normally once the rain started.  He saw no apparitions.

We ponder some more about why Alexis and Rhori found the papers on the
trolls, but Calais didn't.  Rhori figures there was only one paper per
troll, but Calais still wonders why the paper wasn't there when he first
searched the troll.  He repeats Pyotr's theory that only those who fought
the troll could find the papers, but notes that Rhori found the paper on
Paris's troll, whom nobody but Paris had fought (at least, until we got to
the "keep bashing on them to make them stay dead" stage).  Rhori points out
that it could be because Calais did not touch the statue.  Perhaps it is the
spirit of Gillian (the statue) who is sending the clues.  Paris and Calais
figure they should go touch the statue as well.

[I'm not sure why Paris didn't in the first place.  Calais didn't in part to
find out whether it would make any difference -- which it seems maybe we've
learned now -- and in part because there was a long shot possibility that it
was harmful in some way, like only those who touched the statue were subject
to the hallucinations haunting the cave.]

We realise that the other party might've found pieces of paper, and we might
need to find out what was on them.  We need to decide if there's any way to
get them to tell us.  Rhori figures that, in any event, he ought to
apologise to them.

We also discuss how Calais's grating got moved.  We're not sure what sort of
magic would do it (and in particular, whether the mages in Singer's party
have the right type of magic).  Something about the discussion nags at
Rhori's memory but he can't decide what's bugging him about it.

[Calais ends up holding the four new cards.  He makes sure the new folks who
usually keep their own cards -- Alexis, Lucas, Pyotr -- understand that once
there are enough to divvy evenly, we'll do so, but that if anyone thinks
they need their "share" before then they can ask him for it.]

[Meta plan for next week: Our lesser fiasco with the mine foreman shows that
we really need to plan ahead what we intend to say to some of these NPCs.
Our standard technique of going into it cold, often leading to arguments and
side discussions, is not working.  Since Rhori wants to apologise to
Singer's group for the trouble he caused, AND we still hold some shred of
hope of getting some useful info from them (did they find any clues on slips
of paper? what can Father Maythias tell us about demons?), the characters
should spend the afternoon discussing how to approach them, how much we're
willing to tell them, etc.